Submitted by mocha_sweetheart t3_zw253n in singularity
IonizingKoala t1_j1wjqyf wrote
Reply to comment by Surur in Driverless cars and electric cars being displayed as the pinnacle of future transportation engineering is just… wrong. Car-based infrastructure is inefficient, bad for the environment and we already have better technologies in other fields that could help more. An in depth analysis by mocha_sweetheart
And how much more expensive is it to drive in Paris than take public transit?
The goal isn't for public transit to be lightning fast, though that would be great. The goal is for public transit to be easy, economical, and effective enough that we reduce the number of cars on the road to the essential amount, making everything more efficient.
Cars will be faster mode of transportation for decades. This is a totally normal side effect. It means those who actually need a car (ambulances, police, handicapped, running late to meetings) benefit more.
This tradeoff is fine because you can read on a train/tram/bus, you can't while driving. And if you have a chauffeur, I don't think this subject is too relevant anyways.
Surur t1_j1wlsbe wrote
> And how much more expensive is it to drive in Paris than take public transit?
Why would you assume it is more expensive to drive than to use PT.
An All Zones ticket in Paris is 17 euro. If you drive an EV your fuel costs would be much less than that.
> The goal isn't for public transit to be lightning fast, though that would be great.
I like how you casually deem people's free time valueless, despite people only having a limited number of hours to live, which should not be wasted on slow transport. An extra hour per day is 20 hours per month, wasted for nothing, that could have been spent with friends and family.
> The goal is for public transit to be easy, economical, and effective enough that we reduce the number of cars on the road to the essential amount, making everything more efficient.
That is a bit of a nonsense, isn't it? Unless you ban cars (which would make PT worse) people will always prefer the better option. People do not use PT by choice, they use it because the authorities made car travel impractical in some way.
To give you a real example - Germany recently had a 9 euro per month train ticket. It massively increased train usage, but reduced car usage by only 4%. Even if you made PT free, people would still prefer their cars.
> This tradeoff is fine because you can read on a train/tram/bus, you can't while driving. And if you have a chauffeur, I don't think this subject is too relevant anyways.
Kind of ignoring the fact that the thread is about self-driving cars, right? Are you a brigader from fuckcars?
IonizingKoala t1_j1xlgm1 wrote
-The cost of using a car is way beyond the fuel cost, it's insurance, cost of the car itself, maintenance, taxes (registration), parking, and depreciation. It's way more than the 75 euros for a monthly pass in Paris.
-Free time has value. So does working more hours to afford that car.
-Self driving cars won't come free. Tesla FSD is 15k USD and counting and that's the minimum sophistication level needed for true self driving. Stuff like Waymo is nice, though it would be way too expensive if the actual cost of mapping streets and r&d is factored in (like Tesla)
-It takes more than a year for the "invisible hand" to materialize. 4% is also pretty consequential, especially from a congestion perspective.
I'm not against cars at all; in my college town, I drive practically everywhere even though my public transportation is free. But that's because the latter is very limited in scope and reliability. In the main city I live in, I take public transit within the urban areas and only drive when going out to the suburbs.
I'm not saying to ditch cars obviously, but shaving off 30 minutes doesn't really mean that much for the average person. Money is just a way to value time, and even if you're an out of touch multimillionaire, it's easy to understand why people want a more stress-free transportation matrix.
Surur t1_j1y95m6 wrote
The average person, not millionaire, owns a car, and for the average person having a personal vehicle at their beck and call is worth much more than a few hundred euro per month extra, and enables further savings such as living further from the city where housing is cheaper.
> -Self driving cars won't come free.
This is completely irrelevant.
> -It takes more than a year for the "invisible hand" to materialize. 4% is also pretty consequential, especially from a congestion perspective.
4% is irrelevant to congestion, as quieter roads will induce more people to drive, and congested trains due to free travel will cause people to return to their own cars.
> Money is just a way to value time, and even if you're an out of touch multimillionaire, it's easy to understand why people want a more stress-free transportation matrix.
PT is a source of stress and people are willing to give up money to escape it.
> A survey, carried out by French jobs website RegionsJob, has revealed that a whopping 76 percent of Parisians and people living in the Paris region are willing to take a pay cut to avoid the hassle of their daily commute.
https://www.thelocal.fr/20180312/most-parisians-would-take-pay-cut-to-shorten-their-commute/
Tencreed t1_j1yi1ui wrote
>A survey, carried out by French jobs website RegionsJob, has revealed that a whopping 76 percent of Parisians and people living in the Paris region are willing to take a pay cut to avoid the hassle of their daily commute.
Taking a pay cut and avoid the hassle of their daily commute is simple, they just have to leave the Paris area.
Yet it's still one of the most attractive area in the whole country, even with all of its shortfalls. Go figure.
Surur t1_j1yjycv wrote
It's a zoning issue. They need to move the businesses out of the centre of the town. Obviously. Decentralize business and the people will follow.
Laying on PT into town is just feeding the cancer. The surrounding regions are the ones which need the support, but Paris is clearly greedy.
IonizingKoala t1_j1zod6i wrote
Because driving doesn't count as commuting; it's driving, the best joy ever!
Let's assume owning and using a car only costs a few hundred euros a month. Let's assume that parking/traffic is hassle-free (nevermind in Paris, lightly hitting another car's bumper while parking is considered routine as everyone parks in neutral).
I still don't understand what point you're trying to make. I recognize car commuting to be perfectly normal. I'm just under no illusions that it's somehow an efficient and effective commute method for everybody in a dense city like Manhattan/Paris/Tokyo. Tragedy of the commons will occur, and it seems you recognize that too: "quieter roads will induce more people to drive."
Also the cost of self-driving cars is relevant, because that was your response to the whole working-while-commuting point.
Surur t1_j1zszbi wrote
> Also the cost of self-driving cars is relevant, because that was your response to the whole working-while-commuting point.
Are you forgetting which sub you are on? Why is the current price of self-driving, which is not practically available yet, relevant?
> I'm just under no illusions that it's somehow an efficient and effective commute method for everybody in a dense city like Manhattan/Paris/Tokyo.
The issue is not driving, it's the density of the city. The solution is not promoting even greater and greater density by laying on denser and denser transport. It is promoting development outside of the city, so people can travel in security and comfort using personal transport. Why put people through commuter hell so they can promote the growth of Paris?
And people love driving btw (and if you think this is a biased source, read a paper all about why people love car culture here).
IonizingKoala t1_j20owrn wrote
Lower density is expensive. You're spreading out infrastructure costs to less households and businesses, increasing commute times (sure, cars are faster than the bus, but in urban areas is usually the same speed as the subway and walking and cycling), and generally taking up a larger environmental footprint.
Of course I don't want to live in Hong Kong or Singapore core, that's way too crammed. But if we look at Tokyo, which is second in urban development size only to NYC, and is the same size as the state of Connecticut, their population density is not high at all. 200-400 US cities would have higher population density than the Greater Tokyo Area.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but what you want is a medium density, larger urban area kinda like Greater Tokyo or NYC, with everyone free to drive wherever they want with manageable traffic.
This exists in reality, except car ownership is pretty low for Tokyo, and in NYC's car ownership is mostly centred in the suburbs. https://edc.nyc/article/new-yorkers-and-their-cars
So when people are free to choose, only 10-40% of households in your ideal metro area (can't say city cause it's too sparse) choose car ownership. That's not out of poverty, Tokyo and NYC are among the highest earning cities in the world.
What makes those two cities livable and world-class is the public transit that connects the various boroughs together. NYC needs to improve in this regard because they don't have a ring line yet, but Tokyo is pretty good at it. I also picked two random spots in Tokyo, and though car is faster by 10 minutes when it's quiet, it's an hour slower if there's traffic.
The Greater Toronto Area is an example of what happens when you have a medium density, large metro area without good inter-borough public transit (and mediocre intra-borough PT outside of Toronto proper). You have all the high costs of urban living (you gotta pay for each borough's budgets as a separate city, as well as the huge road infrastructure costs) with few of the benefits (suburbs are isolated, you get this very Americanized feel of restrictive zoning and stroads, etc).
You can't pick and choose what aspects of our reality to address; the current price of Self-Driving (nevermind it's not SAE Level 5 yet) matters because it's real life. Just because the topic is Singularitarianism doesn't mean we are allowed to toss money and resource scarcity out the window. Or else I can say hey, singularity, cities won't be necessary anymore because we can live in underground pods and interact in Web 5.0.
Surur t1_j217966 wrote
> Or else I can say hey, singularity, cities won't be necessary anymore because we can live in underground pods and interact in Web 5.0.
Obviously - the person who brought this topic here was an idiot obviously.
> Correct me if I'm wrong, but what you want is a medium density, larger urban area kinda like Greater Tokyo or NYC, with everyone free to drive wherever they want with manageable traffic.
No one would call Tokyo on NYC medium density. NYC has the highest PT use in USA. Its obviously a terrible example of a livable city, as is Tokyo, famous for its PT crush.
Polycentric development is what's needed to give people the room they need to breathe.
In the future we will need less farmland, and we should reclaim that for living space.
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